Social Media Engagement 101: Everything You Need to Know!

Maintaining an online presence on social media for brands is not uncommon these days, but how do you know your brand is appealing to people or liked by people? The only real way to gauge whether your audience is truly connecting with your brand is by noticing whether they engage with your brand’s content online. By engagement, we simply mean interactions, and interactions can mean any of the following things:

1. Interaction with your Page: Clicking on call-to-action buttons such as “register”, “sign up” etc., profile clicks or even link clicks.
2. Interaction with Posts: Commenting, liking, sharing, responding to the post in a DM, messaging about a post through Direct Messaging
3. Interaction with Other Pages: mentions of your page on other page’s posts

While these aren’t the only means of people engaging with your brand on social media, these are some of the most commonly tracked metrics.

Here are a few ways of improving social media engagement:

Ask Your Target Audience

It is a good practice to add a question at the end of your post to engage your audience. Examples of some questions might be: “What do you think?” or “What are you up to on the long weekend?”

Depending on the topic of your post, the questions can be modified to suit your post and invite your audience to share their opinions. You can also open polls on some social media platforms, which encourage your followers to interact with your post.

Leverage “User-Generated Content”

Hashtags and contests are some tactics that you can leverage to get your audience to create and post content for your brand on social media. When your audience posts content that revolves around your brand, this is called “User-Generated Content” or UGC, and it’s a very powerful way to expand your reach online.

Hashtags should be powerful and should be a phrase that speaks to your brand. Hashtags result in increased exposure and discovery and encourages audience interactions. Multiple hashtags have been viral in the past and some have lived on social media forever due to their popularity.

Contests are another great way to connect and interact with your audience. Typically, most brands conduct contests by getting their followers to post or repost their brand content on their pages along with hashtags, and followers are incentivized with a prize for doing so. This can help your brand gain more organic popularity on social media.

Get Personal!

Customers like it when you respond to them personally, rather than posting a blanket message that might appeal to a majority audience. Once your customers start responding to your post, it is a good practice to respond to them personally and by their name. It is also a good idea to curate your responses according to their question or their comment to let them know that they have got your attention, and this will make them feel like you are connecting with them.

Of course, every brand will need to curate their strategy to their target audience and the brand messaging so there is no one-size-fits-all solution.